One of the fundamental objectives of meteorological radar systems is to sample the atmosphere surrounding the Earth to provide a quantitative measure of precipitation. Conventional meteorological radars provide coverage over long ranges, often on the order of hundreds of kilometers. A general schematic of how such conventional radar systems function is provided in FIG. 1. In this illustration, a radar is disposed at the peak of a raised geographical feature such as a hill or mountain 104. The radar generates an electromagnetic beam 108 that disperses approximately linearly with distance, with the drawing showing how the width of the beam 108 thus increases with distance from the radar. Various examples of weather patterns 116 that might exist and which the system 100 attempts to sample are shown in different positions above the surface 112 of the Earth.
For weather radars, the signal coming from ground targets represents clutter. It is generally desirable to mitigate the contribution of clutter to the overall radar signal to improve the quality of the radar signal and for quantitative applications. Such mitigation is conventionally achieved by applying a notch filter around zero Doppler frequency. The main disadvantage of such an approach is the signal loss, especially in cases where weather echoes have small radial velocities. Recent developments in radar signal processors allow for improvement in clutter suppression. For example, one approach compensates for the effect of notching by using advanced spectral filter that interpolates over notched spectral lines. The limitation of spectral filtering techniques is the effect of spectral leakage, caused by finite sample length, on the spectral moments estimates. As a result, spectral processing limits successful clutter suppression to cases of moderate clutter-to-signal ratios. Another approach can use a Gaussian weather model in the frequency domain to remove ground clutter over a variable number of spectral components as described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/322,524.